Our Passover/Easter Survey Results Are In

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Thanks to all of you who responded to our Passover/Easter survey.

The results are in! We just sent out the following press release — let us know what you think of the findings.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Edmund Case, edc@interfaithfamily.com, (617) 581-6805

Interfaith Families Continue To Participate in Secular Easter Activities Without Compromising Their Children’s Jewish Identity; Trend Towards More Comfort with Easter, Steady Observance of Passover

(Boston, MA) — The ninth annual Passover/Easter Survey conducted by InterfaithFamily, an independent non-profit, again shows that interfaith families raising their children Jewish address the “Spring dilemma,” the confluence of Passover and Easter, by continuing to participate in secular Easter activities and continuing to believe that doing so does not compromise their children’s Jewish identity.

Some observers of intermarriage have cast a skeptical eye on this behavior and argue that interfaith families can’t impart a strong Jewish identity to their children and celebrate Christmas or Easter. The results of InterfaithFamily’s surveys suggest that they are doing so.

Interfaith families raising Jewish children who participate in Easter celebrations are giving clear priority to Passover over Easter, as both a family celebration and a religious holiday:

  • Virtually all plan on hosting or attending a seder; 40% will host or attend Easter dinner, an increase from 31% in 2012.
  • Small minorities engage in “religious” Easter activities like attending church (9%) or telling the Easter story (only 1%).
  • Sixty percent see their Easter celebrations as entirely secular, down from 70% in 2012, but only 4% see their Passover celebrations as entirely secular.
  • A full 86% of the respondents believe that their participation in Easter celebrations does not affect their children’s Jewish identity.

“For nine years about half of interfaith couples raising Jewish children have told us they participate in Easter celebrations,” said Edmund Case, CEO of InterfaithFamily. “This year’s survey confirmed that these families by large measure see their Easter celebrations as secular in nature and not confusing to their children’s Jewish identity.”

“This year we observed somewhat more comfort in participating in Easter celebrations (45%), reversing a past decline from 47% in 2010 to 40% in 2011 to 32% in 2012,” Case added. “Meanwhile, the percentage of respondents who are not Jewish who reported being comfortable participating in Passover remained steady at 75%.

For more information, read “What We Learned from the 2013 Passover/Easter Survey,” available online at: http://www.interfaithfamily.com/files/pdf/WhatWeLearnedfromthe2013PassoverEasterSurvey.pdf.

About InterfaithFamily
InterfaithFamily empowers people in interfaith relationships — individuals, couples, families and their children — to engage in Jewish life and make Jewish choices, and strongly encourages Jewish communities to welcome them. We are the premiere resource supporting interfaith couples exploring Jewish life and inclusive Jewish communities, offering educational content; connections to welcoming organizations, professionals and programs; resources and trainings for organizations, clergy and other program providers; and our new InterfaithFamily/Your Community initiative, providing coordinated comprehensive offerings in local communities including Chicago, San Francisco and Philadelphia.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: InterfaithFamily has developed a resource page for interfaith families dealing with the Passover and Easter holidays that includes resources such as “Tips for Interfaith Families: How To Make a Seder Inclusive” and numerous articles that help interfaith families have a more enjoyable and meaningful holiday season. For more, visit www.interfaithfamily.com/passover.

This post originally appeared on www.interfaithfamily.com and is reprinted with permission.

My Interview with Steve and Cokie Roberts

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I had a very interesting interview with Cokie and Steve Roberts last week. We talked about their new book, Our Haggadah, which I’ve blogged about before, and which our Board member Rabbi Rim Meirowitz  reviewed very positively.

I asked the Robertses what their goals were in terms of what they hoped interfaith couples would do with Our Haggadah. Cokie Roberts, a serious Catholic, said her goal was to make it as easy as possible to participate in and host a seder. She said Passover is a joyous festival, but people are intimidated about preparing for it, setting the table, and conducting the service. As I’ve said before, I applaud Cokie Roberts for being so supportive of interfaith couples engaging in Jewish practices like the Passover seder.

I asked whether they thought that interfaith couples would still be having seders twenty or thirty years from now, and both were quite certain that they would. Steve pointed out that seders have been conducted for thousands of years, and Cokie said the seder is joyous, addresses universal themes, is home based (avoiding the barriers that synagogues sometimes present), and personally customizable.

But my question posed the issue that I really wanted to explore – the interplay between Jewish identity and Jewish practices. Because if interfaith couples don’t identity their families, or their children, as Jewish, then in another generation, will the children of those families, themselves married, perhaps intermarried – will they still be interested in conducting or participating in the Passover seder?

Cokie’s answer was that what children will do in terms of Jewish practices is always a question – and aptly added that it is a question about children of two Jewish parents, too. They told me that their family has more Jewish content than the families of Jewish relatives of Steve who are in-married. Cokie said that given the reality of intermarriage, a good solution is to celebrate Jewish traditions as “a major part of the family.”

But that raised the identity/practice question again. Steve said his goal in writing the book was to provide guidance, models and encouragement to the many young interfaith couples that he encounters among his students. The model the Robertses themselves offer is to embrace both religious traditions. They said that choosing one religion, “ceding” to the other, wouldn’t work for them, because each was so deeply tied to their tradition.

So my identity/practice question is still pending. The Robertses said they don’t talk about their own children’s identity or practice, I assume out of respect for their privacy. It sounds like the Roberts’ seders are so wonderful that their children would want to continue to have them for their families. But I’m left to wonder what will happen down the road if the children of interfaith families aren’t raised as and don’t identify as Jews.

I respect the Roberts’ approach and their integrity. They are very serious about religion. Steve said he felt that couples getting married who decide to “just get a judge” because they have difficulty finding clergy “in most cases do a disservice to themselves.” He asks those couples to consider that they come from traditions and can find a way to reflect them – and not pretend they are neutral characters.  He clearly feels that religious traditions can enrich young couples’ lives.

The Robertses are not directive when interfaith couples ask their advice, either. There say there is no necessarily right way for anyone and they don’t push their model on anyone. They readily acknowledge that choosing one religion for a family and children is one way that interfaith couples can go. That is what InterfaithFamily.com has always recommended, although we hasten to add that children should learn about the other religious tradition represented in their family, and participate in it to the extent parents want them to.

We talked about other subjects and we clearly had common ground in many areas, especially the need for the Jewish community to be more welcoming to interfaith couples. Both Cokie and Steve are incredibly smart and articulate – they are great spokespersons for their approach to interfaith family life. Which leaves me, in the end, still wishing that Cokie and Steve Roberts were in IFF’s camp.

This post originally appeared on www.interfaithfamily.com and is reprinted with permission.

Hanukkah 2010

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Happy Hanukkah! I don’t know about you, but I am already wondering if there is any way, when I make latkes this weekend, to avoid making the entire house smell like a fryolator for several days. Do you have any suggestions?

This year I have to make a double batch. Every year we help my wife’s college roommate and her husband, among our oldest and dearest friends, decorate their Christmas tree (neither are Jewish); our gathering is early this year, so I’ll be bringing latkes to them (they love it when it’s Hanukkah so we can light our menorah with their family). The next batch is for our annual Hanukkah gathering with my parents (who are now 93 and 92, still living on their own) in Connecticut. This year I may try some latkes made of both potatoes and butternut squash. We have a lot of great recipes to choose from on the site.

I am really pleased this year with InterfaithFamily.com’s first in-house produced video, Lighting the Hanukkah Menorah. One of our long-range goals is to provide a comprehensive set of introductory “how-to-do-Jewish” resources, and we know that many people prefer to learn from video rather than or in addition to text. We hope this will be one of the first of many helpful videos. Benjamin Maron, our new managing editor, gets the writer/director/producer credit, and we want to especially thank our on-screen talent, our good friend from JewishBoston.com Liz Polay-Wettengel, and her family. They should be movie stars!

I’m also pleased that we have a new article by Rabbi Steven Carr Reuben, who has also made a series of videos for us, “Rabbi Reuben’s Ruminations,” professionally produced by the Jewish Television Network. I’m happy about it because there are people who say that the meaning of Hanukkah is antithetical to welcoming interfaith families to Jewish life and community. They say that Hanukkah commemorates a rebellion by the Jews against assimilation into the Hellenistic Greek society that surrounded them – and they make the common mistake of equating intermarriage with assimilation. Rabbi Reuben explains that “Jewish civilization represents a value system that declares to every single individual human being on earth, that what they say matters, and what they do matters, and who they are matters.” The Jews were resisting assimilation into a culture where “the only rule that mattered was that whoever had the most power and carried the biggest club got to make the rules,…”  a culture of bigotry and prejudice based on “might makes right.” He concludes,

Light the lights this year with pride as we continue to stand for the enduring values that celebrate the fundamental spiritual worth of every human spirit.  That is why Hanukkah continues to matter.

That’s hardly a message that is antithetical to embracing interfaith families.

Finally, we do two surveys a year, around Hanukkah and Christmas, and again around Passover and Easter. We just released the report on our seventh December Holidays Survey. Cathy Grossman blogged about our survey on her Faith & Reason blog on USAToday.com. I really respect Cathy’s writing but I’m not sure I agree with her take on our survey results this year.

Our holiday surveys have consistently focused on interfaith families that are raising their children as Jews, to illuminate how such families deal with potential conflict between Hanukkah and Christmas, and how they participate in Christmas celebrations at all. Over the years almost all of these families celebrate Hanukkah, and about half have a Christmas tree in their own home. An extremely small percentage, as low as 1%, “tell the Christmas story” – which of course is fundamentally religious in nature, and in comments our survey respondents say that Christmas doesn’t have religious significance to them, it is just a warm family time with traditions from the parent who is not Jewish. Kind of like Thanksgiving is a warm family time that isn’t religious.

The surveys have consistently shown a higher percentage of respondents who treat Hanukkah as a religious holiday. This year, for example, 55% said they would tell the Hanukkah story. When asked to rate the religious or secular nature of their holiday participation, 23% said their Hanukkah celebrations were religious and 28% said they were secular (49% said half and half), vs. 2% who said their Christmas celebrations were religious and 89% who said they were secular (only 9% said half and half). We did note in a press release that there was an increase this year from 20% to 28% who said their Hanukkah celebrations were secular, and that is what Cathy zeroes in on in her blog post.

But there was another finding noted in our press release suggesting a different trend. We saw in increase in the percentage who said they would celebrate Hanukkah in the synagogue this year, from 62% last year to 71% this year. So I don’t think it’s quite fair to suggest that the prevailing way that interfaith families raising Jewish children celebrate Hanukkah is in a secular way without religious significance. What do you think?

This post originally appeared on www.interfaithfamily.com and is reprinted with permission.